Course:

Introduction to Literary Theory

Lecture 1: What is theory?
 What is theory?
• Please provide some definitions of theory, not
just theory of literature
• How do you understand ‘literary theory’?
• Come up with some definitions of literary
theory
 Theory as genre
• in literary studies, not an account of the nature of literature or methods for its
study.
• a body of thinking and writing whose limits are exceedingly hard to define; works
that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to
which they apparently belong.
• Still, the above, an unsatisfactory definition but it seems to capture what has
happened since the 1960s: writings from outside the field of literary studies have
been taken up by people in literary studies because their analyses of language, or
mind, or history, or culture, offer new and persuasive accounts of textual and
cultural matters.
• Theory, NOT a set of methods for literary study BUT an unbounded group of
writings about everything under the sun, from the most technical problems of
academic philosophy to the changing ways in which people have talked about and
thought about the body.
• includes works of anthropology, art history, film studies, gender studies,
linguistics, philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, science studies, social and
intellectual history, and sociology; offer accounts others can use about meaning,
nature and culture, the functioning of the psyche, the relations of public to private
experience and of larger historical forces to individual experience.
 What is Literature?
• Come up with definitions of literature. List
them all.
• Do you think this question is central question
for literary theory? If yes/no, why?
 Does it Matter?
• What is literature? – not central for literary theory
• 2 main reasons:
• 1. theory - ideas from philosophy, linguistics, history,
political theory, and psychoanalysis. Why should theorists
worry about whether the texts they're reading are literary
or not? (e.g. students and teachers of literature today, a
whole range of critical projects, topics to read and write
about)
• not all texts are somehow equal: some are taken to be
richer, more powerful, more exemplary, more
contestatory, more central. But both literary and
non-literary works can be studied together and in similar
ways.
 Does it Matter?
• 2. the distinction not central because works of theory have
discovered what is most simply called the 'literariness' of
non-literary phenomena.
• Theorists have come to insist on the importance in
non-literary texts
• In showing how rhetorical figures shape thought in other
discourses as well, theorists demonstrate a powerful
literariness at work in supposedly non-literary texts, thus
complicating the distinction between the literary and the
non-literary.
• Speaking of the discovery of the 'literariness' of non-literary
phenomena indicates that the notion of literature
continues to play a role and needs to be addressed.
 What sort of question?
• 'What is literature?‘:
• It
• might be a question about the general nature of this object, literature, which both
of you already know well. What sort of object or activity is it? What does it do?
What purposes does it serve? Thus understood, 'What is literature?' asks not for a
definition but for an analysis, even an argument about why one might concern
oneself with literature at all.
• might also be a question about distinguishing characteristics of the works known
as literature: what distinguishes them from non-literary works? What
differentiates literature from other human activities or pastimes? Now people
might ask this question because they were wondering how to decide which books
are literature and which are not, but it is more likely that they already have an idea
what counts as literature and want to know something else: are there any
essential, distinguishing features that literary works share?
• This is a difficult question. Theorists have wrestled with it, but without notable
success. The reasons are not far to seek: works of literature come in all shapes and
sizes and most of them seem to have more in common with works that aren't
usually called literature than they do with some other works recognized as
literature.
 Treating texts as literature
• The importance of context, where you come
across a text;
• To make a text literature, to imagine a title
whose relation to the line would pose a
problem and exercise the imagination;
• invites a certain kind of attention, calls for
reflection;
• an interest in the words, their relations to one
another, and their implications, in how what is
said relates to the way it is said
 Treating texts as literature
• How does language work?
• when removed from other contexts, detached from other
purposes, language can be interpreted as literature
(though it must possess some qualities that make it
responsive to such interpretation).
• If literature is language decontextualized, it is also itself a
context, which promotes or elicits special kinds of
attention.
• To describe 'literature' would be to analyse a set of
assumptions and interpretive operations readers may
bring to bear on such texts.
 Conventions of literature
• Literary narratives, 'narrative display texts',
utterances whose relevance to listeners lies not in
information they convey but in their 'tellability'.
• Literature, a speech act or textual event that elicits
certain kinds of attention;
• Aren't there special ways of organizing language that
tell us something is literature? Or is the fact that we
know something is literature what leads us to give it
a kind of attention we don't give newspapers and, as
a result, to find in it special kinds of organization and
implicit meanings? – Both, possible.
 The nature of literature
• Literature as the 'foregrounding' of language
• Literature as the integration of Language
• Literature as fiction
• Literature as aesthetic object
• Literature as intertextual or self-reflexive
construct